IN THE LAB

HOTHAUSING Laboratory: How we THINK and What We DO

Wel­come to our exper­i­men­tal space which seeks to give you an insight into our cre­ative engine room. We fer­tilise ideas from South­ern Nar­ra­tives (HOT), and fuse them into forms of cre­ative trans­mis­sion with a trans­par­ent social trans­for­ma­tive func­tion­al­ity (Bauhaus) — Hence HOT HAUS. We are inspired by nar­ra­tives and peo­ples that are excluded or silenced by the Colo­nial Matrix of Power and work quickly with or with­out fund­ing or the val­i­da­tion of cul­tural gate keep­ers, usu­ally very well fed people.

I have found over the last 25 years that The­atre in Britain excludes more than it includes despite the good inten­tions of diver­sity poli­cies and cul­tural agenda mak­ers. Why wait another 25 years to be included? And included into what exactly? So rather than try­ing to force sec­tions of soci­ety to imbibe the the­atri­cal sen­si­bil­i­ties of the few, why not decolonise and dis­man­tle the idea of The­atre by explor­ing pluriver­sal visions of story telling, tak­ing Sto­ries to any space, any where, any time? So we con­tin­u­ally cre­ate Lab­o­ra­to­ries in mul­ti­ple spaces where ideas and craft may be fer­tilised. Is this not merely Work­shop­ping by another name? Well no, we are not work­ing to go shop­ping! Our imper­a­tives are rooted in the gap­ing loud silences weep­ing from the Colo­nial Wound. Spaces for lis­ten­ing and shar­ing are urgently required. Where do peo­ple of exile her­itages go to prac­tice or share story or craft prac­tices, how do we share ances­tral mem­ory and under­stand how cul­ture evolves? The Colo­nial Matrix of Power in five hun­dred years of engage­ment with ‘OTHERS’ has yet to pro­duce an African Per­for­mance Art Acad­emy, for instance, so Black Actors are just that ‘Black’. There are no Inter­cul­tural Per­form­ing Acad­e­mies, not in Eng­land, yet. You can­not study Fanon or Said in sec­ondary school. So when lib­er­als speak of Inclu­siv­ity and let­ting ‘the Other’ speak no-one has the slight­est idea of how to do it, except through the image and sen­si­bil­i­ties of the well fed few.

The Dias­pora Space is our play­ground — it is a rich space to prac­tice lis­ten­ing and shar­ing — here are some of the games we have been play­ing recently.

Patrice Naiambana
African Performer-Conceptualist